FURMAN, PS AUDIO, ISOTEK??


Dear friends,
I want to add a power conditioner to my system as everybody says I will improve my system, I never tried nor listened it before. Can you please give your impressions and what would you prefer???
My equipment: DALI EUPHONIA MS4 + MOON EVOLUTION 600i + DAC MUSIC HALL 25.3
Thanks for your help!!!
xdemo
you have nice gear...if you can borrow some pieces and hear how it sounds you'll be way ahead of the game. If you do not have a dedicated circuit for your stereo then I would do that first and add a power cord to the DAC....if you have fairly clean electricity you might not need a conditioner. I use an Exact Power EP15A which holds the current at a steady 120 volts and protects against surges and brownouts.
The very wide and disparite opinions expressed about power conditioners of all sorts makes me wonder if you can say that they will upgrade your system in any general way. There are exceptions to this if there is a particular problem. For instance power regenerators for people who have power brown outs and peaks who wish to stabalize their power. Other specific examples are out there I am too lazy to list the ones I can think of. So unless you have a very specific issue invest you upgrade money eleswhere.
You didn't mention power cords. What do you have? I would address this first.
And how much are you prepared to pay for how much improvement? Generally speaking, to get some control over the incoming current is quite expensive. But still you could improve the situation for a few hundred dollars if you wait and buy used.
Thanks a lot to everybody, it has been a great help.
The conclusion is going step by step so I will start with a couple of power cords.
Any recommendation on this??
With any power conditioner that has magnetics in it (the Furman and the PS Audio both do) should not be run past 50% of their capacity, else they will degrade things rather than help. The reason is distortion of the AC power, which usually becomes pronounced once a transformer is past 50% of its capacity. This make diodes more noisy, power transformers more noisy, and likely is the reason you see variable opinions about the usefulness of power conditioning.

For the most part, we recommend that people avoid using AC conditioners with our amps. IMO, the best use of conditioners is with the front end of the system.

Now there is one power conditioner that really works and can handle a lot of power. It was made by Elgar and is not a high end audio product. But right up to full capacity it can make a perfect sine wave at its output and is the only conditioner I know of that can do that. It is mechanically noisy, so to use it, it is installed where your breaker box is and then the line that runs the audio room is connected to it. They are not cheap, and Elgar does not make them any more :(